As participants on a multi-person conference call discuss a topic of interest, the participants often encounter information deficit problems that may be characterized as: (1) the breaking news problem and (2) the missing expertise problem. The breaking news problem involves a lack of awareness of events occurring in real-time that may be of particular relevance to the discussion topic. The missing expertise problem involves the discovery of a sudden lack of expertise required to perpetuate the productivity of the discussion. The lack of expertise may include the need for a subject matter expert or additional information or data.
These problems may result in a much less productive conference call and significant losses to an organization's potential productivity in total time lost. Additionally, these problems may sometimes be destructive to the progress and effectiveness of a business team by creating more problems than they solve, as participants may be acting on information that may be out-of-date or acting on potentially erroneous assumptions.
The present practice for producing timely and accurate information relevant to a conference call in progress relies on the participants in the call either to manually seek out real-time news sources for relevant information or to receive email or voice alerts. In either event, the participants manually interject relevant information into the conference call in an ad hoc manner. The present practice thus relies on the diligence of the participants and requires manual interruption of a conference call.
These and other problems are addressed in certain embodiments of the present disclosure.